Harvard-UNC: What to expect

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As mentioned in Tuesday’s On the Vine podcast, pace of game will determine whether Harvard can win a NCAA tournament game for the third straight season.

The Tar Heels are 1-5 in games with fewer than 65 possessions, while Harvard has played in only eight games this season with more than 65 possessions. In other words, the slower the game, the more successful the Crimson are likely to be.

Harvard ranks 34th in the country in adjusted defensive efficiency, and North Carolina has been a turnover-prone team all season, prone to poor passing and occasionally pushing tempo at the expense of smart offense.

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Steve Donahue is safe, and Penn won’t be sorry

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Steve Donahue won three Ivy championships at Cornell. Few coaches share such a rich Ancient Eight pedigree. (Reuters)
Steve Donahue won three Ivy championships as head coach at Cornell from 2008 to 2010. Few coaches share such a rich Ancient Eight pedigree. (Reuters)

“You are better safe than sorry,” Penn Athletic Director Grace Calhoun said at her Tuesday press conference … in an alternate universe.

But that’s what most people are thinking: Steve Donahue was the safe hire. The safest of safe hires. For those people, Calhoun may as well have introduced him as he sat encased in bubble wrap.

But does safe mean it’s the wrong hire? If you think so, I’ll just refer you to the aphorism in my lede.

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On the Vine – March 17

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Check out our archive of the latest On the Vine podcast, in which David Freed of the Harvard Crimson and Aaron Dodson of the Daily Tar Heel join Peter online casino Andrews & Mike Tony to cover the latest Ivy action. Segments include a preview of and predictions for No. 13 Harvard”s NCAA tournament matchup with No. 4 North Carolina, a discussion of Yale”s unfortunate season fate and much more:

Undefeated Princeton absurdly gets No. 8 seed in NCAA tournament

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The Princeton women’s basketball team was awarded a No. 8 seed in the NCAA tournament Monday despite a 30-0 regular season – the best by any women’s or men’s team in Ivy history, a No. 13 ranking, a 3-0 record against the RPI Top 50 and an average margin of victory of 24.9 points per game.

This is a squad that bIew out Pitt, Drexel, Wake Forest, Charlotte and Georgetown, and beat Michigan 85-55 in Ann Arbor. A No. 8 seed shows that the selection committee does not know how to evaluate midmajor teams whatsoever. As Graham Hays of espnW.com writes in his No. 1 Burning Question for the committee:

“In the entire history of the NCAA tournament, Princeton is just the fourth mid-major to enter the event undefeated. There have been a lot of soft schedules and a lot of weak conferences over the course of those 30-plus seasons. Perfect seasons still didn’t happen.

Four times teams from beyond the elite did it. Four. The same number of times No. 8 seeds reached the Sweet 16.

Some reward.”

The Tigers will play Wisconsin-Green Bay in College Park, Md. on Saturday at 11 a.m. on ESPN2.

IHO 2014-15 All-Ivy Awards

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Ivy Hoops Online founder Ian Halpern, On the Vine host Peter Andrews and I combined to determine the 2014-15 All-IHO selections:

IHO PLAYER OF THE YEAR

Justin Sears, Yale (Jr., F – Plainfield, N.J.)

Sears snared IHO POY honors for his yeoman’s work in the Yale frontcourt, registering 14.3 points, 7.5 rebounds and 2.4 blocks per game, pushing the Bulldogs just short of their first NCAA tournament berth in 53 years. Sears eclipsed 25 points in four Ivy contests and anchored a stout Yale defense all season long. (For the record, I voted for Wesley Saunders for POY based on his second-half heroics in the Ivy playoff game, but I was outvoted 2-1. It’s a good problem to have several legitimate POY candidates, though, that’s for sure.)

IHO ROOKIE OF THE YEAR

Kyle Castlin, Columbia (Fr., G – Marietta, Ga.)

Castlin made an immediate impact in the Lions’ dynamic backcourt, posting 18 points in 30 minutes in just his second collegiate game and displaying levels of body control and offensive awareness that most players in this league never attain. He scored in double figures in 14 of 28 games and was one of the few constants in a Columbia offense that struggled to find options beyond Maodo Lo.

IHO DEFENSIVE PLAYER OF THE YEAR

Shonn Miller, Cornell (Sr., F – Euclid, Ohio)

Miller anchored Cornell’s gritty and physically large defense, posting 1.8 blocks and 1.3 steals per game while notching a 28 percent defensive rebound rate that was good for seventh in the country. Cornell doesn’t beat Harvard late in the season without Miller’s defensive chops, and it certainly doesn’t finish third in the league in scoring defense without him either.

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Penn to hire Steve Donahue as next head coach

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Dick Jerardi of the Philadelphia Daily News reported this afternoon that Steve Donahue will become the next head basketball coach at Penn, replacing Jerome Allen, who Donahue coached at Penn as an assistant, a position he held from 1990-2000.

The Springfield, Pa. native was an assistant coach at Monsignor Bonner High School near Philadelphia under current Lafayette head coach (and fellow former Penn assistant) Fran O’Hanlon from 1987 to 1988 before serving as an assistant at Philadelphia University from 1988 to 1990. Donahue’s Ivy and Philly ties stretch way back.

But of course, Donahue is best known throughout the Ivy League for head coaching Cornell from 2000 to 2010, making the NCAA tournament in his final three seasons in Ithaca, including a Sweet 16 appearance in 2010. Donahue finished 146-138 (.514) at Cornell, which did not finish with a winning record in Ivy play until Donahue’s fifth season.

Donahue moved on to Boston College in 2010 but struggled mightily with recruiting in Chestnut Hill, going just 54-76 (.415) in four seasons as head coach there before getting fired in 2014.

Donahue’s teams are known for motion offense, which worked with great success toward the end of hs run at Cornell and even at BC, where Donahue’s defenses repeatedly failed him.

The move was perhaps the easiest for Penn Athletic Director Grace Calhoun to make because current Penn assistant coach Nat Graham also served under Donahue at Boston College and Cornell in that same capacity.

Calhoun used Fogler Consulting to assist with the head coaching search.

The news comes just nine days after it was reported that former Penn coach Jerome Allen would be fired after five and a half seasons at the helm, and just six days after Penn’s 2014-15 season finale.

Yale gets snubbed by NIT, won’t (can’t) participate in postseason

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Proving further that there is little justice in how NCAA basketball teams are evaluated, especially mid-major squads, Yale was left out of the NIT Sunday evening despite a No. 74 KenPom  ranking, No. 63 RPI and  22-10 record that finished with a gut-wrenching loss to Harvard in Saturday’s Ivy playoff game at the Palestra.

Yale’s losing out on a NIT bid so late prevented the Bulldogs from grabbing a spot in the CBI or CIT, which filled quickly. The Elis will not be one of 148 teams involved in this year’s postseason.

“It was a great year. One of the best years Yale has had,” Yale coach James Jones told Chris Hunn of the New Haven Register. “If we can’t get in this year, I don’t know how we can get in. It’s disheartening.”

It is disheartening, but the NIT has done this to the Ivy League before. In 2011, Harvard garnered only a 6 seed despite beating Colorado, Boston College and George Washington before finishing with a 12-2 conference record and a 63-62 loss in the Ivy playoff game to Princeton.

With Princeton declining a postseason bid, the number of Ivies in the postseason has dwindled to two: Harvard in the NCAA tournament and Dartmouth in the CIT. The Ivies appeared to be loaded preseason and did provide one of the most outstanding conference slates in league history. For many reasons, in Yale’s case chiefly a bias against mid-major teams and comparatively low Ivy visibility, the Ancient Eight postseason won’t reflect those efforts.

No. 13 Harvard to play No. 4 UNC in NCAA first round

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No. 13 Harvard (22-7, 11-3 Ivy)  will play No. 4 North Carolina (24-11, 11-7 ACC) in the West Region in Jacksonville Thursday in the Crimson’s fourth straight NCAA appearance. The game will tip off at 7:20 p.m. Thursday on TNT.

The Crimson clinched their NCAA bid Saturday with a 53-51 win over Yale in the Ivy playoff game at the Palestra. Harvard defeated Cincinnati as a 12 seed last season before losing to then-No. 4 Michigan State. In 2013, Harvard defeated New Mexico as a 14 seed before losing to then-No. 6 Arizona.

The matchup interestingly pits Harvard coach and Duke grad Tommy Amaker against the Tar Heels, which made best online casino the round of 32 last season as a 6 seed before losing to then-No. 9 Iowa State. North Carolina has never lost its first game in the NCAA tournament under coach Roy Williams, who took over at UNC in 2003, and Williams has never lost an opening-round game in 24 NCAA tourney appearances at UNC and Kansas.

The last time UNC played an Ivy League team in the NCAA tournament was 2001, when No. 2 North Carolina defeated No. 15 Princeton, 70-48. No. 1 North Carolina also defeated No. 16 Penn in 1987, 113-82, eight years after losing to the No. 9 Quakers as a 1 seed in 1979, as Penn went on to a Final Four appearance.

Wesley Saunders wins, but so does Javier Duren

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Javier Duren transcended game results with his grounded, appreciative postgame outlook. (ivyleaguesports.com)
Javier Duren transcended game results with his grounded, appreciative postgame outlook. (ivyleaguesports.com)

Wesley Saunders made the right play.

Harvard gained possession with 33 seconds to go and the game tied at 51-51, an NCAA tournament berth on the line. Junior guard Siyani Chambers successfully handed the ball off to Saunders, who then went to work. He drove in the lane with 10 seconds left, and when the defense converged, he kicked the ball out to senior forward Steve Moundou-Missi, the Ivy League defensive player of the year. Moundou-Missi had went on an offensive run earlier in the contest, scoring six straight points, but the two points that he’ll remember most for the rest of his career are the ones that he notched after catching Saunders’ pass and draining a jumper from the top of the key.

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The Palestra – Arena of dreams

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Yale freshman guard Makai Mason looks on as Harvard celebrates a fourth straight NCAA tournament berth in front of a crowd of 5.256 at the Palestra. (AP)
Yale freshman guard Makai Mason looks on as Harvard celebrates a fourth straight NCAA tournament berth in front of a crowd of 5.256 at the Palestra. (AP)

If you play it, they will come.

For Saturday’s Ivy League playoff, the emotions ran the gamut from high to low, from hope to despair, from anxiety to exhilaration, as the Palestra played the role of backdrop to one final night of Ivy League theatre, regaining its role as the arena of Ancient Eight dreams.

Harvard-Yale was everything one could have asked for and more with the third game in the fierce rivals’ season series nearly needing overtime. Seriously, what could have been better? You take two evenly matched teams playing to the wire and feature them at by far the best arena in the entire conference.

All I ask is that we see this again.

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